Apache Kafka in Manufacturing at Automotive Supplier Brose for Industrial IoT Use Cases

Kai Waehner
4 min readSep 27, 2024

Data streaming unifies OT/IT workloads by connecting information from sensors, PLCs, robotics and other manufacturing systems at the edge with business applications and the big data analytics world in the cloud. This blog post explores how the global automotive supplier Brose deploys a hybrid industrial IoT architecture using Apache Kafka in combination with Eclipse Kura, OPC-UA, MuleSoft and SAP.

Data Streaming and Industrial IoT / Industry 4.0

Data streaming with Apache Kafka plays a critical role in Industrial IoT by enabling real-time data ingestion, processing, and analysis from various industrial devices and sensors. Kafka’s high throughput and scalability ensure that it can reliably handle and integrate massive streams of data from IoT devices into analytics platforms for valuable insights. This real-time capability enhances predictive maintenance, operational efficiency, and overall automation in industrial settings.

Here is an exemplary hybrid industrial IoT architecture with data streaming at the edge in the factory and 5G supply chain environments synchronizing in real-time with business applications and analytics / AI platforms in the cloud:

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Kai Waehner

Technology Evangelist — www.kai-waehner.de → Big Data Analytics, Data Streaming, Apache Kafka, Middleware, Microservices => linkedin.com/in/kaiwaehner